X-Ray of the Project Portfolio With Design Thinking

Lourdes Medina is a PMO/PPM consultant and coach in Latin-America. With more than 15 years of project and portfolio management experience, with an emphasis on both operational and consulting perspectives, she has worked in a large scope of industries including banking, insurance, retail, insurance, public sector and consumer products.

The use of X-rays allows us to obtain images of the body’s insides to view a particular part. The images are intended for observation in order to reach various diagnoses. We would like to do something similar with a project portfolio in order to also diagnose the value that such initiatives bring to the business. We often ask ourselves how the initiatives list can be considered in order to evaluate the portfolio.

Diagnosis of the generation of the project portfolio’s value begins with the prioritization, evaluation, and selection processes of the portfolio’s components in order to guarantee that the projects to be executed are aligned with the strategic objectives of the business. Our starting point to ensure value generation is to work on the project portfolio’s efficacy with the purpose of reaching the desired effect after executing the initiatives that are necessary to the organization. To achieve this, we must prioritize and select the right projects for the business. However, our project portfolio is iterative; we may have identified the wrong need, and if we did, we must change it. Or maybe we must come to realize that the right need appeared, but we had the wrong solution and we need to change that.

The optimization and definition processes of a project portfolio involve a series of steps such as optimizing, selecting, evaluating, and